![]() ![]() Tritton declined to comment for this article.īed Bath & Beyond had fallen a long way by the time he arrived. Tritton was bold enough to scrap some big but stagnant Target brands and replace them with instantly successful house names like Cat & Jack and Opalhouse.īed Bath & Beyond vendors and workers saw a potential savior, and so did Wall Street-maybe the company could reinvent itself as a buzzy “Tarzhay.” But as would soon become clear, as talented as Tritton was, a new CEO can’t just assume his playbook from one company will automatically work at another. Tritton was the whiz chief merchant at Target who oversaw the creation of many of that retailer’s highly successful store brands, engineering 30 label launches in less than three years that helped fuel its stunning turnaround. That’s why, when Bed Bath & Beyond announced in October 2019 that Tritton was taking the reins, investors were elated. That crappy place predates the pandemic by a substantial span. While the company’s sales only started to decline in 2018, its problems had been brewing for years. “They’ve got no senior leadership, they’ve got no strategy, and they’re trying to swing the pendulum back to where it was, and that was a pretty crappy place.” A retail wunderkind misfires “Where do they find themselves now?” asked Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School and a former CEO of Sears Canada. ![]() More fundamentally, Bed Bath & Beyond has to figure out why it needs to exist in consumers’ eyes. has the leadership team to execute our plans for holiday.” (Some roles in the C-suite have been combined.) A company spokesperson told Fortune in a statement that “the board is very confident that Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. The CEO and finance chief roles are both occupied by interim officers it named a new chief merchant only a few months ago and the recent departures of the company’s operations chief and its stores chief are also big changes at the start of the key holiday season. Perhaps most daunting of all, Bed Bath & Beyond now has to try to effect a turnaround, largely based on reversing most of Tritton’s work, at a time when there are major vacancies in the C-suite. That led Gove and her team to spend a lot of time on damage control this summer. #Target sheets update#Bed Bath & Beyond declined to make Gove available for further comment for this piece, saying the CEO would provide an update publicly on Thursday when the company reports quarterly earnings.Īs for those notes? Well, it’s possible that the vendors were just being polite with a declining but still sizable customer. While no vendors have said publicly that they would pull back either partly or altogether from Bed Bath & Beyond, the company acknowledged in August a number of them have tightened their financing terms. “That’s come in the form of thank-you notes.” She went on to say there has been a “wide, open-armed embrace” of Bed Bath & Beyond’s old-is-new strategy. “One of the most telling pieces to me, in terms of their receptivity, is how they are parroting back to us our strategy,” Gove replied. The retailer was now pivoting back to national brands in its umpteenth turnaround attempt would they be willing to keep its shelves stocked in the upcoming holiday season and beyond? ![]() After all, they’d been burned by the company two years ago, when it shifted its focus to building its own brands. In late August, Gove was asked by a Wall Street analyst how she could be so sure that those vendors would be willing to work with Bed Bath & Beyond. (Its business crisis was thrust into an even wider spotlight, in early September, by the suicide of Gustavo Arnal, who was reportedly deeply anxious over the condition of the company.)īut Gove, a board member who took the reins in June after Bed Bath & Beyond abruptly ousted CEO Mark Tritton, insists that she still has the trust of vendors-the big national brands that make the sheets, home goods, and other staples on whom the retailer’s survival depends. The company has been plagued for years by plunging sales, lightning-fast cash burn, and a depleted C-suite. Those are what Bed Bath & Beyond’s interim CEO, Sue Gove, has said give her succor as she tries to dig the deeply troubled home goods retailer out of a massive crisis. ![]()
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